Author of Florida’s Black History Curriculum Tries to Gaslight its Critics
Last month, the Florida Board of Education approved a new set of standards for teaching black history in the state’s public schools. Essentially, the new curriculum paints enslavement as some kind of unpaid internship that taught slaves useful skills that would benefit them personally. The new curriculum has received plenty of criticism, and deservedly so. (I put in my own two cents in an earlier post.)
Of course, not everyone opposes the new curriculum. It does have a few defenders, most notably those who were responsible for approving it or for proving its content.
There are essentially two ways to try to defend the controversial curriculum. One way would be to insist that it is true that slavery helped black people develop useful skills. This was the approach taken by the Florida Department of Education, which offered up several alleged examples of slaves who acquired skills that helped them later in life. These examples, however, were almost entirely debunked.
Although I do not endorse this approach (because I think the new curriculum is indefensible), at least the members of the Department of Education were honest about the curriculum they adopted and had enough integrity to stand by it.
Then there is the other approach to defending the new curriculum, the approach taken by right-wing Oreo cookie, William B. Allen, who was a member of the workshop that wrote the new guidelines. In an essay published in the National Review, Allen denied that the curriculum says anything about slaves benefiting from their bondage and that the critics are guilty of “willful misinterpretation.”
Let us start by reading the sentence that Allen claims critics like me are willfully misinterpreting.
“Slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Now let us consider Allen’s defense of that statement, which would be laughable if it were not so insulting to the intelligence of critics and defenders alike. He claims that this sentence does not say that the slaves developed these skills while being enslaved. They could have developed these skills before being enslaved or after achieving their freedom.
Here is a quote from Allen making the same point in an interview on NPR:
“It’s grammar is certainly perfectly clear when refers to the fact that those who were held in slavery possess skills, whether they developed them before being held in slavery, while being held in slavery or subsequently to being held in slavery, from which they benefited when they applied themselves in the exertion of those skills.”
(Note the switch from “developed” to “possessed.” So Allen is also lying about the actual words used.)
One obvious problem with this defense is that it assumes Governor Desantis and his hand-picked cronies who developed the curriculum were acting in good faith — that they genuinely aimed at presenting a fair and accurate overview of black history in America rather than trying to push some right-wing quasi-fascist agenda. That is hard to believe given Desantis’s declaration of war against the awareness of racial discrimination in our society (i.e., wokeness), his banning of any effort by colleges to include members of groups that have been traditionally discriminated against, and his promise to honor more Confederate leaders. Plus one of his speech writers was recently exposed as a neo-Nazi sympathizer.
Another problem is that the vast majority of slaves in early America were born into bondage and died in bondage. So, any skills they developed could have been acquired only while they were enslaved. And it is doubtful that they — as property of their slave owners — could benefit personally from these skills.
Even if we set all that aside, Allen’s interpretation is obviously absurd. He ignores what philosophers and linguists call “implicature.” Implicature refers to what is meant by, but not explicitly stated in, a linguistic utterance. It is determined by context as well as linguistic and cultural norms.
To illustrate, consider this little vignette: A man went to a restaurant and ordered the soup du jour. When the waiter brought the soup, it had a live cockroach swimming around in it. The man yelled, “This is disgusting!” and stormed out without paying.
So, did the man eat the soup? The story does not say one way or the other. But obviously he did not; it would not make sense if he did. And because it would not make sense, it would have to be explicitly stated if it happened. We would have to say “… it had a live cockroach swimming in it. And he ate it anyway!” Or “… [he] stormed out without paying — even though he ate the soup!”
Implicature is not just suggested or hinted at; it is part of the meaning of a statement. And good thing too. Otherwise, telling a story would be tedious. A man went to a restaurant. He went inside. He came in through the door (not the window or down the chimney). He sat down (rather than ordering standing up)… in a chair (not on the table or on the floor). Etc.
The play between explicit meaning and implicature can be manipulated for comic effect. For example, comedian Mitch Hedberg (God rest his soul) had a bit where he announced to his audience, “I used to do heroin.” After the congratulatory applause died down, he added, “I still do heroin; but I used to also.” It is funny because when you say “I used to…,” you are implying that you don’t any more.
But Allen is no comedian. And denying the obvious implicature of the statement about slaves developing skills is not funny. It is a form of gaslighting, not entertainment. He claims that the sentence does not mean what it obviously does mean and accuses critics of making a big ado about nothing.
The statement says that slaves developed skills, not former slaves. And it says they developed skills, not that they already possessed skills. Thus, the sentence means that slaves developed skills while enslaved (and that these skills sometimes benefited them personally). For this sentence to mean anything else, it would have to say so explicitly.
Allen says that the grammar of the sentence is clear. But grammar is not the same as meaning. Consider this example, courtesy of Noam Chomsky: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” The grammar is perfectly clear, but the meaning is nonsensical. Meaning is determined by a combination of grammar (or syntax), the meaning of words and phrases (or semantics), and what linguistics call “pragmatics,” which includes things like implicature.
In defense of the curriculum he helped to develop, Allen tries to deny what it says. He claims that slavery benefited those enslaved and then denies that he claims that. Philosophers have a word for that too: “bullshit.” Allen’s unwillingness to stand by his own claims demonstrates a lack of integrity. But I guess we shouldn’t expect anything more from a man who, as chairman of the Civil Rights Commission under W. Bush, was arrested for kidnapping a 14-year-old girl.
